Bill Gates and the importance of source code

Bill Gates was interviewed by the BBC’s Money Programme. As he prepares to significantly reduce his direct work for Microsoft Corporation, Bill reflects upon what got him started in the first place and what kept him ahead of the ‘competition’. The video provides a brief glimpse into the character that founded and guided Microsoft. Regardless of whether you love him or hate him, he is indeed a fascinating character.

Skip ahead to the 40 second mark, to the segment titled “How the teenage Gates and his friend Paul Allen got access to a computer”. The story according to Gates was that he and his friends were allowed to hack on a company’s computer “like monkeys” at night to find bugs. He spent hours reading manuals and experimenting to figure out this “fascinating puzzle”. However, they were stuck at the “tinkering” stage until they stumbled across the source code in a rubbish bin. It was only then could the monkeys evolve.

I don’t think the producers of the show realised the significance of this admission, since they quickly cut to another segment. Reading between the lines, Gates is essentially confessing that he would not have progressed had he and Paul Allen not found the source code. Without this knowledge, and without this opportunity to understand and experiment with how the internals of a computer worked, Gates and Allen would have been severely constrained in their ability to found a software company and develop products

I would go so far as to say that Microsoft owes its very existence to this access to source code.

To anyone with a passing familiarity to how things worked back then, this comes as no surprise. Source code was expected to be free, and this in turn nurtured a generation of computer hackers. But whereas Richard Stallman saw the amazing potential of this freedom and wanted to preserve it for all, Bill Gates appears to have perceived it as an advantage for himself that he must deny to others.

I disagree. In any other industry there would be no question that a process that has had a lot of human though applied to it, such as source code is worth paying for. Just look at the controversy in Formula 1 spying row for an example of how businesses keep their blueprints secret (http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/motorsport/formula_one/6264904.stm).
If people want to to give stuff away for free, then that’s fine. However it’s likely the company they work for during daytime hours charges for software, and paying their wages.

As for Marc’s comments, clearly he doesn’t regard as developing software (or otherwise contributing) to open-source projects and communities as an investment. For every hour I spend towards the community, I am the recepient of at least hundred back. Of course I can choose to not contribute and just use what every the community has provided, but that is my choice. Why do people volunteer for the rural fire service, or supporting older/younger people in their physical community for no monetary return – isn’t the argument that Marc makes just as self-interested?

In response to #1, no one is questioning that people who wish to can keep their source code secret and can charge others for the privilege. But you notice that Bill Gates paid no one anything for access to the source code that gave him insight into fixing the system. He got it for free. Imagine if he could have had the source code, but only for $20,000. He would have kept tinkering without paying anyone, and the bugs would have been harder if not impossible to find and fix.

In particular, almost all of Microsoft’s code is really nothing special from a professional engineering standpoint. In fact, it mostly has no special technical merit. Its real value, to Microsoft and indeed to everyone else, is its ubiquity. This is really what they are charging you for.

Why else would their even be a demand for SAMBA? And yet SAMBA has to do things the hard way, without the source code.

I think image plays a big role in this sort of interview’s so I am not that sure the source was really analyzed.
Also every company uses a lot of public knowledge to function. Many are using different kinds op private knowledge. Sometimes this private knowledge doesn’t consist only of things like marketing data or production processes but is a part of the sold product itself.

[…] who have an understanding on how programming and the education of programmers work, that “Microsoft owes its very existence to this access to source code“. As this article points out: I don’t think the producers of the show realised the […]

“From: ‘Programmers at work’, Microsoft Press, Redmond, WA [1986]:
Interviewer: “Is studying computer science the best way to prepare to be a programmer?”
Gates: “No, the best way to prepare is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating system.”

Actually, Bill Gates had no legal rights whatsoever to accuse the Altair hobbyists of anything. Software was not protected by US Copyright law until 1980 and software could not be patented in the US until 1981.

There seems to be a strange idea that our current set of laws is somehow an eternal fixture stretching to infinity in both the past and the future. The truth is that people like Bill Gates (and others) put pressure on the lawmakers to build a set of laws that suited themselves. Bill Gates created his own legal rights by a combination of money, influence and political pressure. Using similar methods, he managed to wriggle out of any punishment after being convicted as a monopolist in both US and Europe.